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PUBLICATIONS OF 
THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD 



OCCASIONAL PAPERS No. 6 



The Worth of Ancient 

Literature to the 

Modern World 



BY 

VISCOUNT BRYCE, O. M. 



GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD 

61 Broadway New York City 

1917 



THE PUBLICATIONS OF THE 
GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD 

reports: 

THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD: AN ACCOUNT OF ITS ACTIV- 
ITIES, I902-I9I4. CLOTH, 254 PAGES, WITH 32 FULL-PAGE 
ILLUSTRATIONS AND 3 I MAPS. 

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD, 
I9I4-I9I5. CLOTH AND PAPER, 82 PAGES, WITH 8 MAPS. 

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD, 
I9I5-I916. CLOTH AND PAPER, 86 PAGES, WITH IO MAPS. 

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD, 
I916-I9I7.* 

studies: 

PUBLIC EDUCATION IN MARYLAND, BY ABRAHAM FLEXNER AND 
FRANK P. BACHMAN. 2ND EDITION. 176 PAGES, AND APPEN- 
DIX, WITH 25 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS AND 34 CUTS. 
THE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, BY THOMAS H. BRIGGS.* 
THE GARY SCHOOLS, BY MEMBERS OF THE GARY SURVEY STAFF.* 
COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY FINANCE, BY TREVOR ARNETT.* 

OCCASIONAL papers: 

1. THE COUNTRY SCHOOL OF TO-MORROW, BY FREDERICK T. 

GATES. PAPER, IS PAGES. 

2. CHANGES NEEDED IN AMERICAN SECONDARY EDUCATION, 

BY CHARLES W. ELIOT. PAPER, 29 PAGES. 

3. THE MODERN SCHOOL, BY ABRAHAM FLEXNER. PAPER, 23 

PAGES. 

4. THE FUNCTION AND NEEDS OF SCHOOLS OF EDUCATION IN 

UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES, BY EDWIN A. ALDERMAN. 
PAPER, 31 PAGES, WITH APPENDIX. 

5. LATIN AND THE A. B. DEGREE, BY CHARLES W. ELIOT. 

PAPER, 21 PAGES, WITH APPENDIX. 

6. THE WORTH OF ANCIENT LITERATURE TO THE MODERN 

WORLD, BY VISCOUNT BRYCE. PAPER, 20 PAGES.* 

7. THE POSITIVE CASE FOR LATIN, BY PAUL SHOREY.* 
• In Preparation. 



The REPORTS issued by the Board are official accounts of its ac- 
tivities and expenditures. The STUDIES represent work in the field of 
educational investigation and research which the Board has made pos- 
sible by appropriations defraying all or part of the expense involved. 
The OCCASIONAL PAPERS are essays on matters of current educa- 
tional discussion, presenting topics of immediate interest from various 
points of view. In issuing the STUDIES and OCCASIONAL PA- 
PERS, the Board acts simply as publisher, assuming no responsibility 
for the opinions of the authors. 

The publications of the Board may be obtained on request 



Fsblii 

fes tw -m 







THE WORTH OF ANCIENT LITER- 
ATURE TO THE MODERN WORLD* 

^HAT the study of the Greek and Latin languages should be 
now disparaged need cause no surprise, for a reaction against 
the undue predominance they enjoyed in education a century 
ago was long overdue. What is remarkable is that the disposition to 
disparage them and exalt another class of subjects has laid hold of 
certain sections of the population which were not wont to interest 
themselves in educational matters, but used to take submissively 
whatever instruction was given them. It is a remarkable fact; 
but though remarkable, it is not hard to explain. The most 
striking feature in the economic changes of the last eighty years 
has been the immense development of industrial production by 
the application thereto of discoveries in the sphere of natural 
science. Employment has been provided for an enormous number 
of workers, and enormous fortunes have been accumulated by 
those employers who had the foresight or the luck to embark 
capital in the new forms of manufacture. Thus there has been 
created in the popular mind an association, now pretty deeply 
rooted, between the knowledge of applied science and material 
prosperity. It is this association of ideas, rather than any pride 
in the achievements of the human intellect by the unveiling of the 
secrets of Nature and the setting of her forces at work in the ser- 
vice of man, that has made a knowledge of physical science seem 
so supremely important to large classes that never before thought 
about education or tried to estimate the respective value of the 
various studies needed to train the intelligence and form the 
character. 
To put the point in the crudest way, the average man sees, 

* This paper originally appeared in the Fortnightly Review, April, 191 7, and 
is reprinted with the courteous permission of its author and of the editor of 

the Fortnightly Review. 



4 
or thinks he sees, that the diffusion of a knowledge of languages, 
literature, and history does not seem to promise an increase of 
riches either to the nation or to the persons who possess that knowl- 
edge, while he does see, or thinks he sees, that from a knowledge 
of mechanics or chemistry or electricity such an increase may be 
expected both to the community and to the persons engaged in 
the industries dependent on those sciences. This average man ac- 
cordingly concludes that the former or the literary kinds of knowl- 
edge have, both for the individual and for the community, far less 
value than have the latter, i.e., the scientific. 

Two other arguments have weighed with persons more reflec- 
tive than those whose mental attitude I have been describing; and 
their force must be admitted. Languages — not merely the ancient 
languages, but languages in general — have too often been badly 
taught, and the learning of them has therefore been found repulsive 
by many pupils. The results have accordingly been disappointing, 
and out of proportion to the time and labour spent. Comparatively 
few of those who have given from six to eight years of their boyhood 
mainly to the study- of Greek and Latin retain a knowledge of 
either language sufficient to afford either use or pleasure to them 
through the rest of life. Of the whole number of those who yearly 
graduate at Oxford or at Cambridge, I doubt if at thirty years of 
age 15 per cent, could read at sight an easy piece of Latin, or 5 
per cent, an easy piece of Greek. As this seems an obvious sort of 
test of the effect of the teaching, people come to the conclusion that 
the time spent on Greek and Latin was wasted. 

Let us frankly admit these facts. Let us recognize that the 
despotism of a purely grammatical study of the ancient languages 
and authors needed to be overthrown. Let us also discard some 
weak arguments our predecessors have used, such as that no one 
can write a good English style without knowing Latin. There 
are too many cases to the contrary. Nothing is gained by trying 
to defend an untenable position. We must retire to the stronger 
lines of defence and entrench ourselves there. You will also agree 
that the time has come when every one should approach the sub- 
ject not as the advocate of a cause but in an impartial spirit. We 
must consider education as a whole, rather than as a crowd of 
diverse subjects with competing claims. What is the chief aim 
of education? What sorts of capacities and of attainments go to 



s 

make a truly educated man, with keen and flexible faculties, ample 
stores of knowledge, and the power of drawing pleasure from the 
exercise of his faculties in turning to account the knowledge he has 
accumulated? How should the mental training fitted to produce 
such capacities begin? 

First of all by teaching him Eow to observe and by making him 
enjoy the habit of observation. The attention of the child should 
from the earliest years be directed to external nature. His ob- 
servation should be alert, and it should be exact. 

Along with this he should learn how to use language, to know the 
precise differences between the meanings of various words ap- 
parently similar, to be able to convey accurately what he wishes 
to say. This goes with the habit of observation, which can be 
made exact only by the use in description of exact terms. In 
training the child to observe constantly and accurately and to use 
language precisely, two things are being given which are the founda- 
tion of mental vigour— curiosity, i.e., the desire to know — and the 
habit of thinking. And in knowing how to use words one begins to 
learn — it is among the most important parts of knowledge — how 
to be the master and not the slave of words. The difference be- 
tween the dull child and the intelligent child appears from very early 
years in the power of seeing and the power of describing: and that 
which at twelve years of age seems to be dullness is often due merely 
to neglect. The child has not been encouraged to observe or to 
describe or to reflect. 

Once the Love of Knowledge and the enjoyment in exercising 
the mind have been formed, the first and most critical stage in 
education has been successfully passed. What remains is to supply 
the mind with knowledge, while further developing the desire to 
acquire more knowledge. And here the question arises: What 
sort of knowledge? The field is infinite, and it expands daily. 
How is a selection to be made? 

One may distinguish broadly between two classes of knowledge, 
that of the world of nature and that of the world of man, i.e., be- 
tween external objects, inanimate and animate, and all the products 
of human thought, such as forms of speech, literature, all that be- 
longs to the sphere of abstract ideas, and the record of what men 
have done or said. The former of these constitutes what we call 
the domain of physical science; the latter, the domain of the so- 



6 
called Humanities. Every one in whom the passion of curiosity 
has been duly developed will find in either far more things he desires 
to know than he will ever be able to know, and that which may 
seem the saddest but is really the best of it is that the longer he 
lives, the more will he desire to go on learning. 

How, then, is the time available for education to be allotted 
between these two great departments? Setting aside the cases 
of those very few persons who show an altogether exceptional gift 
for scientific discovery, mathematical or physical, on the one hand, 
or for literary creation on the other, and passing by the question of 
the time when special training for a particular calling should begin, 
let us think of education as a preparation for life as a whole, so 
that it may fit men to draw from life the most it can give for use and 
for enjoyment. 

The more that can be learnt in both of these great departments, 
the realm of external nature and the realm of man, so much the 
better. Plenty of knowledge in both is needed to produce a capable 
and highly finished mind. Those who have attained eminence 
in either have usually been, and are to-day, the first to recognize the 
value of the other, because they have come to know how full of 
resource and delight all true knowledge is. There is none of us who 
are here to-day as students of language and history that would 
not gladly be far more at home than he is in the sciences of Nature. 

To have acquired even an elementary knowledge of such branches 
of natural history as, for instance, geology or botany, not only 
stimulates the powers of observation and imagination, but adds 
immensely to the interest and the value of travel and enlarges the 
historian's field of reflection. So, too, we all feel the fascination 
of those researches into the constitution of the material universe 
which astronomy and stellar chemistry are prosecuting within the 
region of the infinitely vast, while they are being also prosecuted 
on our own planet in the region of the infinitely minute. No man 
can in our days be deemed educated who has not some knowledge of 
the relation of the sciences to one another, and a just conception 
of the methods by which they respectively advance. Those of us 
who apply criticism to the study of ancient texts or controverted 
historical documents profit from whatever we know about the 
means whereby truth is pursued in the realm of Nature. In these 
and in many other ways we gladly own ourselves the debtors of our 



7 
scientific brethren, and disclaim any intention to disparage either 
the educational value or the intellectual pleasure to be derived from 
their pursuits. Between them and us there is, I hope, no conflict, 
no controversy. The conflict is not between Letters and Science, 
but between a large and philosophical conception of the aims of 
education and that material, narrow, or even vulgar view which 
looks only to immediate practical results and confounds pecuniary 
with educational values. 

We have to remember that for a nation even commercial suc- 
cess and the wealth it brings are, like everything else in the long 
run, the result of Thought and Will. It is by these two, Thought 
and Will, that nations, like individuals, are great. We in Eng- 
land are accused, as a nation and as individuals, of being deficient 
in knowledge and in the passion for knowledge. There may be 
some other nation that surpasses us in the knowledge it has accu- 
mulated and in the industry with which it adds to the stock of its 
knowledge. But such a nation might show, both in literature and 
in action, that it does not always know how to use its knowledge. 
It might think hard, harder perhaps than we do, but its thought 
might want that quality which gives the power of using knowledge 
aright. Possessing knowledge, it might lack imagination and 
insight and sympathy, and it might therefore be in danger of seeing 
and judging falsely and of erring fatally. It would then be in worse 
plight than we; for these faults lie deep down, whereas ours can be 
more easily corrected. We can set ourselves to gain more knowl- 
edge, to set more store by knowledge, to apply our minds more 
strenuously to the problems before us. The time has come to do 
these things, and to do them promptly. But the power of seeing 
truly, by the help of imagination and sympathy, and the power 
of thinking justly, we may fairly claim to have as a nation generally 
displayed. Both are evident in our history, both are visible in 
our best men of science and learning, and in our greatest creative 
minds. 

This is not, I hope, a digression, for what I desire to emphasize 
is the need in education of all that makes for width of knowledge 
and for breadth and insight and balance in thinking power. The 
best that education can do for a nation is to develop and strengthen 
the faculty of thinking intensely and soundly, and to extend from 
the few to the many the delights which thought and knowledge give, 



8 
saving the people from degenerating into base and corrupting 
pleasures by teaching them to enjoy those which are high and pure. 

Now we may ask: What place in education is due to literary 
and historical studies in respect of the service they render to us 
for practical life, for mental stimulus and training, and for enjoy- 
ment? 

These studies cover and bear upon the whole of human life. 
They are helpful for many practical avocations, indeed in a certain 
sense for all avocations, because in all we have to deal with other 
men; and whatever helps us to understand men and how to handle 
them is profitable for practical use. We all of us set out in life 
to convince, or at least to persuade (or some perhaps to delude) 
other men, and none of us can tell that he may not be called upon 
to lead or guide his fellows. 

Those students also who explore organic tissues or experiment 
upon ions and electrons have to describe in words and persuade 
with words. For dealing with men in the various relations of life, 
the knowledge of tissues and electrons does not help. The knowl- 
edge of human nature does help, and to that knowledge letters 
and history contribute. The whole world of emotion — friendship, 
love, all the sources of enjoyment except those which spring from 
the intellectual achievements of discovery — belong to the human 
field, even when drawn from the love of nature. To understand 
sines and logarithms, to know how cells unite into tissues, and of 
what gaseous elements, in what proportion, atoms are combined 
to form water — all these things are the foundations of branches of 
science, each of which has the utmost practical value. But they 
need to be known by those only who are engaged in promoting those 
sciences by research or in dealing practically with their applications. 
One can buy and use common salt without calling it chloride of 
sodium. A blackberry gathered on a hedge tastes no better to 
the man who knows that it belongs to the extremely perplexing 
genus Rubus and is a sister species to the raspberry and the cloud- 
berry, and has scarcely even a nodding acquaintance with the bil- 
berry and the bearberry. None of these things, interesting as they 
are to the student, touches human life and feeling. Pericles and 
Julius Caesar would have been no fitter for the work they had to do 
if they had been physiologists or chemists. No one at a supreme 
crisis in his life can nerve himself to action, or comfort himself under 



9 
a stroke of fate, by reflecting that the angles at the base of an 
isosceles triangle are equal. It is to poetry and philosophy, and to 
the examples of conduct history supplies, that we must go for 
stimulus or consolation. How thin and pale would life be without 
the record of the thoughts and deeds of those who have gone before 
us! The pleasures of scientific discovery are intense, but they are 
reserved for the few; the pleasures which letters and history bestow 
with a lavish hand are accessible to us all. 

These considerations are obvious enough, but they are so often 
overlooked that it is permissible to refer to them when hasty voices 
are heard calling upon us to transform our education by over- 
throwing letters and arts and history in order to make way for 
hydrocarbons and the anatomy of the Cephalopoda. The sub- 
stitution in our secondary schools of the often unintelligent and 
mechanically taught study of details in such subjects has already 
gone far, perhaps too far for the mental width and flexibility of the 
next generation. 

If, then, we conclude that the human subjects are an essential 
part, and for most persons the most essential part, of education j 
what place among these subjects is to be assigned to the study of 
the ancient classics, or, as I should prefer to say, to the study of 
the ancient world? This question is usually discussed as if the forms 
of speech only were concerned. People complain that too much 
is made of the languages, and discredit their study, calling them 
"dead languages," and asking of what use can be the grammar and 
vocabulary of a tongue no longer spoken among men. 

But what we are really thinking of when we talk of the ancient 
classics is something far above grammar and the study of words, 
far above even inquiries so illuminative as those which belong to 
Comparative Philology. It is the ancient world as a whole; not 
the languages merely, but the writings; not their texts and style 
merely, but all that the books contain or suggest. 

This mention of the books, however, raises a preliminary ques- 
tion which needs a short consideration. Is it necessary to learn 
Greek and Latin in order to appreciate the ancient authors and 
profit by their writings? What is the value of translations? Can 
they give us, if not all that the originals give, yet so large a part 
as to make the superior results attainable from the originals not 
worth the time and trouble spent in learning the languages? Much 



IO 

of the charm of style must, of course, be lost. But is that charm so 
great as to warrant the expenditure of half or more out of three or 
four years of a boy's life? 

This question is entangled with another, viz., that of the value, 
as a training in thought and in the power of expression, which the 
mastery of another language than one's own supplies. I will not, 
however, stop to discuss this point, content to remark that all 
experienced teachers recognize the value reterred to, and hold it 
to be greater when the other language mastered is an inflected 
language with a structure and syntax unlike those of modern forms 
of speech, such as Latin and Greek, and such as Icelandic, together 
with some of the Slavonic languages, almost alone among modern 
civilized languages, possess. Let us return to the question of^ the 
worth of translations. It is a difficult question, because netther 
those who know the originals nor those who do not are perfectly 
qualified judges. The former, when they read their favourite 
author in a translation, miss so much of the old charm that they may 
underestimate its worth to the English reader. The latter, know- 
ing the translation only, cannot tell how much better the original 
may be. It is those who, having read an author in a translation, 
afterwards learn Greek (or Latin) and read him in the original, 
that are perhaps best entitled to offer a sound opinion. 

Prose writers, of course, suffer least by being translated. Poly- 
bius and Procopius, Quintus Curtius, and Ammianus Marcellinus 
can give us their facts, Epictetus and the Emperor Marcus their 
precepts and reflections, almost as well in our tongue as in their own. 
Most of us find the New Testament more impressive in English, 
which was at its best in the early seventeenth century, than in 
Hellenistic Greek, which had declined so far in the first and second 
centuries as to be distasteful to a modern reader who is familiar 
with the Attic writers. The associations of childhood have also 
had their influence in making us feel the solemnity and dignity of 
the English version. Even among writers of prose there are some 
whose full grace or force cannot be conveyed by the best translation. 
Plato and Tacitus are examples, and so, among moderns, is Cer- 
vantes, some of whose delicate humour evaporates (so to speak) when 
the ironical stateliness of his Castilian has to be rendered in an- 
other tongue. The poets, of course, suffer far more, but in very 
unequal degree. Lucan or Claudian, not to speak of Apollonius 



II 

Rhodius, might be well rendered by any master of poetical rhetoric 
such as Dryden or Byron. But the earlier bards, and especially 
Pindar and Virgil, Sophocles, and Theocritus, are untranslatable. 
If one wants to realize how great can be the loss, think of the version 
Catullus produced of Sappho's ode that begins ^afvexai [iol xeivoq 
iabq GeoTatv. The translator is a great poet and he uses the same 
metre, but how low in the Latin version do the fire and passion of 
the original burn! In the greatest of the ancients the sense is so 
inwoven with the words and the metre with both that with the two 
last elements changed the charm vanishes. Whatever admiration 
we may give to some of the verse renderings of Homer and to some 
of those admirable prose renderings which our own time and coun- 
try have produced, one has to say of them all much what Bentley 
said to Pope, "A very pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer." 
The want, in English, of any metre like the Greek hexameter is alone 
fatal. 

If we are asked to formulate a conclusion on this matter, shall 
we not say that whoever wishes to draw from the great ancients 
the best they have to give must begin by acquiring a working 
acquaintance with, though not necessarily a complete grammatical 
mastery of, the languages in which they wrote? Those who cannot 
find time to do this will have recourse to such translations, now 
readily obtainable, as convey accurately the substance of the classi- 
cal writers. Style and the more subtle refinements of expression 
will be lost, but the facts, and great part of the thoughts, will 
remain. The facts and the thoughts are well worth having. But 
that real value and that full delight which, as I shall try to indicate, 
the best ancient authors can be made to yield to us can be gained 
only by reading them in the very words they used. 

This would be the place for an examination of the claims of 
modern languages. Both the practical utility of these languages, 
and especially of Spanish, hitherto far too much neglected, and 
their value as gateways to noble literatures, are too plain to need 
discussion. The question for us here to-day is this: Are these 
values such as to enable us to dispense with the study of the ancient 
world? I venture to believe that they do not, and shall try in the 
concluding part of this address to show why that study is still an 
essential part of a complete education. 

But before entering on the claims of the classics, a word must 



12 

be said on a practical aspect of the matter as it affects the curricula 
of schools and universities. I do not contend that the study of 
the ancients is to be imposed on all, or even on the bulk, of those 
who remain at school till eighteen, or on most of those who enter 
a university. It is generally admitted that at the universities the 
present system cannot be maintained. Even of those who enter 
Oxford or Cambridge, many have not the capacity or the taste to 
make it worth while for them to devote much time there to Greek 
and Latin. The real practical problem for all our universities is 
this: How are we to find means by which the study, while dropped 
for those who will never make much of it, may be retained, and for^ 
ever securely maintained, for that percentage of our youth, be it 
20 or 30 per cent, or be it more, who will draw sufficient mental 
nourishment and stimulus from the study to make it an effective 
factor in their intellectual growth and an unceasing spring of enjoy- 
ment through the rest of life? This part of our youth has an im- 
portance for the nation not to be measured by its numbers. It is 
on the best minds that the strength of a nation depends, and more 
than half of these will find their proper province in letters and 
history. It is by the best minds that nations win and retain leader- 
ship. No pains can be too great that are spent on developing such 
minds to the finest point of efficiency. 

We shall effect a saving if we drop that study of the ancient lan- 
guages in the case of those who, after a trial, show no aptitude 
for them. But means must be devised whereby that study shall, 
while made more profitable through better methods, be placed in 
a position of such honour and importance as will secure its being 
prosecuted by those who are capable of receiving from it the benefits 
it is fitted to confer. 

For the schools the problem is how to discover among the boys 
and girls those who have the kind of gift which makes it worth 
while to take them out of the mass and give them due facilities 
for pursuing these studies at the higher secondary schools, so that 
they may proceed thence to the universities and further prosecute 
them there. Many of you, as teachers, know better than I how this 
problem may be solved. Solved it must be, if the whole community 
is not to lose the benefit of our system of graded schools. 

Returning to the question of what benefits we receive from the 
study of the ancient world as it speaks to us through its great 



13 
writers, I will venture to classify those benefits under four heads. 

I. Greece and Rome are the well-springs of the intellectual life 
of all civilized modern peoples. From them descend to us poetry 
and philosophy, oratory, and history, sculpture and architecture, 
even (through East Roman or so-called "Byzantine" patterns) 
painting. Geometry, and the rudiments of the sciences of observa- 
tion, grammar, logic, politics, law, almost everything in the sphere 
of the humanistic subjects, except religion and poetry inspired by 
religion, are part of their heritage. One cannot explore the first 
beginnings of any of these sciences and arts without tracing it 
back either to a Greek or to a Roman source. All the forms poetical 
literature has taken, the epic, the lyric, the dramatic, the pastoral, 
the didactic, the satiric, the epigrammatic, were of their inventing; 
and in all they have produced examples of excellence scarcely ever 
surpassed, and fit to be still admired and followed by whoever seeks. 

To the ancients, and especially to the poets, artists, and philo- 
sophers, every mediaeval writer and thinker owed all he knew, and 
from their lamps kindled his own. We moderns have received the 
teaching and the stimulus more largely in an indirect way through 
our mediaeval and older modern predecessors, but the ultimate 
source is the same. Whoever will understand the forms which 
literature took when thought and feeling first began to enjoy their 
own expression with force and grace, appreciating the beauty and 
the music words may have, will recur to the poetry of the Greeks 
as that in which this phenomenon — the truest harbinger of civilisa- 
tion — dawned upon mankind. The influences of the epic in the 
Homeric age, of the lyric in the great days that begin from Archilo- 
chus, of the drama from Aeschylus onwards — these are still living 
influences, this is a fountain that flows to-day for those who will 
draw near to quaff its crystal waters. In some instances the 
theme itself has survived, taking new shapes in the succession of 
the ages. One of such instances may be worth citing. The noblest 
part of the greatest poem of the Roman world is the sixth book of 
the Aeneid which describes the descent of the Trojan hero to the 
nether world. It was directly suggested to Virgil by the eleventh 
book of the Odyssey, called by the Greeks the Nekuia, in which 
Odysseus seeks out the long-dead prophet Tiresias to learn from him 
how he shall contrive his return to his home in Ithaca. The noblest 
poem of the Middle Ages, one of the highest efforts of human genius, 



14 
is that in which Dante describes his own journey down through Hell 
and up through Purgatory and Paradise till at last he approaches 
the region where the direct vision of God is vouchsafed to the ever 
blessed saints. The idea and many of the details of the Divina 
Commedia were suggested to Dante by the sixth Aeneid* The 
Florentine poet who addresses Virgil as his father is thus himself the 
grandchild of Homer, though no line of Greek was ever read by him. 
In each of these three Nekuiai the motive and occasion for the 
journey is the same. Something is to be learnt in the world of 
spirits which the world of the living cannot give. In the first it 
is to be learnt by a single hero for his own personal ends. In the 
second Aeneas is the representative of the coming Rome, its 
achievements and its spirit. In the third the lesson is to be taught 
to the human soul, and the message is one to all mankind. The 
scene widens at each stage, and the vision expands. The historical 
import of the second vision passes under the light of a new religion 
into a revelation of the meaning and purpose of the universe. How 
typical is each of its own time and of the upward march of human 
imagination! Odysseus crosses the deep stream of gently-flowing 
Ocean past a Kimmerian land, always shadowed by clouds and 
mists, to the dwelling of the dead, and finds their pale ghosts, un- 
substantial images of their former selves, knowing nothing of the 
Present, but with the useless gift of foresight, saddened by the 
recollection of the life they had once in the upper air— a hopeless 
sadness that would be intense were their feeble souls capable of 
anything intense. The weird mystery of this home of the departed 
is heightened by the vagueness with which everything is told. 
That which is real is the dimness, the atmosphere of gloom, a dark- 
ness visible which enshrouds the dwellers and their dwelling-place. 
The Hades of Virgil is more varied and more majestic. In it 
the monstrous figures of Hellenic mythology are mingled with 
personifications of human passions. We find ourselves in a world 
created by philosophic thought, far removed from the childlike 

*It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that the part played by Circe in 
the Odyssey suggests that played by the Cumaean Sibyl in the Aeneid and the 
latter the appearance of his Guide to Dante. So the line of hapless heroines 
whom Odysseus sees (Book xi. 11. 225-332) reappears with variations in 
Aeneid vi. 445, introducing the touching episode of the address of Aeneas to 
Dido; and among the sorrowful figures whom Dante meets none are touched 
more tenderly than Francesca in the Inferno avid la Pia in the Purgatorio. 



is 

simplicity of the Odyssey. There are Elysian fields of peace, with a 
sun and stars of their own, yet melancholy broods over the scene, 
the soft melancholy of a late summer evening, when colours are 
fading from the landscape. 

In the Divine Comedy we return to something between the primi- 
tive realism of early Greece and the allegorical philosophy of Virgil. 
Dante is quite as realistic as Homer, but far more vivid; he is as 
solemn as Virgil, but more sublime. The unseen world becomes as 
actual as the world above. Everything stands out sharp and clear. 
The Spirits are keenly interested in the Past and the Future, 
though knowing nothing (just as in Homer) of the Present. Ghosts 
though they be, they are instinct with life and passion, till a region 
is reached in highest heaven of which neither Homer nor Virgil ever 
dreamed, because its glory and its joys transcend all human ex- 
perience. Three phases of thought and emotion, three views of life 
and what is beyond life, of the Universe and the laws and powers 
that rule it, find their most concentrated poetical expression in 
these three visions of that Place of Spirits, which has always been 
present to the thoughts of mankind as the undiscovered background 
to their little life beneath the sun. 

II. Secondly. Ancient classical literature is the common pos- 
session, and, with the exception of the Bible and a very few med- 
iaeval writings, the only common possession, of all civilised peoples. 
Every well-educated man in every educated country is expected to 
have some knowledge of it, to have read the greatest books, to re- 
member the leading characters, to have imbibed the fundamental 
ideas. It is the one ground on which they all meet. It is therefore 
a living tie between the great modern nations. However little 
they may know of one another's literature, they find this field 
equally open to them all, and equally familiar. Down till the 
seventeenth century the learned all over Europe used Latin as 
their means of communication and the vehicle of expression for their 
more serious work in prose. Ever since the Renaissance gave 
Greek literature back to Western and Central Europe and turned 
the critical labours of scholars upon ancient writings, scholars in all 
countries have vied with one another in the purifying of the texts 
and elucidation of the meaning of those writings; and this work 
has given occasion for constant intercourse by visits and correspond- 
ence between the learned men of England, Scotland, France, Ger- 



i6 

many, Italy, Holland, Denmark. Thus was maintained, even after 
the great ecclesiastical schism of the sixteenth century, the notion 
of an international polity of thought, a Republic of Letters. The 
sense that all were working together for a common purpose has 
been down to our own days, despite international jealousies (now, 
alas! more bitter than ever before), a bond of sympathy and union. 

III. Thirdly. Ancient History is the key to all history, not to 
political history only, but to the record also of the changing thoughts 
and beliefs of races and peoples. Before the sixth century b. c. we 
have only patriarchal or military monarchies. It is with the Greek 
cities that political institutions begin, that different forms of govern- 
ment take shape, that the conception of responsible citizenship 
strikes root, that both ideas and institutions germinate and blossom 
and ripen and decay, the institutions overthrown by intestine sedi- 
tions, and finally by external power, the ideas unable to maintain 
themselves against material forces, and at last dying out because 
the very discussion of them, much less their realization, seemed 
hopeless, and it only remained to turn to metaphysical speculation 
and ethical discourse. But the ideas and the practice, during the 
too brief centuries of freedom, had found their record in histories and 
speeches and treatises. These ideas bided their time. These give 
enlightenment to-day, for though environments change, human 
nature persists. That which makes Greek history so specially 
instructive and gives it a peculiar charm is that it sets before us a 
host of striking characters in the fields of thought and imaginative 
creation as well as in the field of political strife, the abstract and the 
concrete always in the closest touch with one another. The poets 
and the philosophers are, so to speak, a sort of chorus to the action 
carried forward on the stage by soldiers, statesmen, and orators. 
In no other history is the contact and interworking of all these 
types and forces made so manifest. We see and understand each 
through the other, and obtain a perfect picture of the whole. 

So also are the annals of the Imperial City a key to history, but 
in a different sense. The tale of the doings of the Roman people 
is less rich in ideas, but it is of even higher import in its influence 
on all that came after it. As Thought and Imagination are the 
notes of the Hellenic mind, so Will and Force are the notes of the 
Roman — Force with the conceptions o" Order, Law, and System. 
It has a more persistent and insistent volition, a greater gift for 



i7 
organization. Roman institutions are almost as fertile by their 
example as the Greek mind was by its ideas. Complicated and 
cumbrous as was the constitution of the Roman Republic, we see 
in it almost as wonderful a product of fresh contrivances devised 
from one age to another to meet fresh exigencies as is the English 
Constitution itself, and it deserves a scarcely less attentive study. 
But high as is this permanent value for the student of politics, still 
higher is its importance as the starting-point for the history of the 
European nations, some of whom it had ruled, all of whom it 
taught. It created a body of law and schemes of provincial and 
municipal administration, which, modified as all these have been by 
mediaeval feudalism, became the basis of the governmental systems 
of modern States. Still more distinctly was the Roman Empire in 
West and East the foundation on which the vast fabric of church 
government has been raised. As the religious beliefs and supersti- 
tions and usages of the Romano-Hellenic world affected early 
Christianity, so did the organization of the Empire serve as a model 
for the organization of the Christian Church. Without a knowledge 
of these things it is impossible to understand ecclesiastical history. 
The riddles of the Middle Ages — and they are many — would be 
insoluble without a reference back to what went before; nor need I 
remind you how much of the Middle Ages has lasted down into 
our own days, nor how in the fifteenth century the long-silent voices 
of ancient Greece awoke to vivify and refine the thought and the 
imagination of Europe. 

IV. Lastly, the ancient writers set before us a world super- 
ficially most unlike our own. All the appliances, all the para- 
phernalia of civilisation were different. Most of those appliances 
were indeed wanting. The Athenians in their brightest days had 
few luxuries and not many comforts. They knew scarcely anything 
about the forces of Nature, and still less did they know how to turn 
them to the service of man. Their world was small. The chariot 
of their sun took less than five hours to traverse the space between 
the Euphrates and the Pillars of Hercules, and many parts within 
that space were unknown to them. Civilised indeed they were, but 
theirs was a civilisation which consisted not in things material, but 
in art and the love of beauty, in poetry and the love of poetry, in 
music and a sensibility to music, in a profusion of intelligence active, 
versatile, refined, expressing its thoughts through wonderfully rich 



i8 
and flexible forms of speech. There was little wealth and little 
poverty, some inequality in rank but not much in social relations: 
women were secluded, slavery was the basis of industry. Yet it was 
a complete and perfect world, perfect in almost everything except 
religion and those new virtues, as one may call them, which the 
Gospel has brought in its train. Human nature was, in essentials, 
what it is now. But it was a youthful world, and human nature ap- 
peared in its simplest guise. Nature was all alive to it. It looked 
out on everything around it with the fresh curiosity of wide-open 
youthful eyes. As the Egyptian priest said to Solon, with a 
deeper wisdom than perhaps he knew, the Greeks were children. 
Like children, they saw things together which moderns have learnt 
to distinguish and to keep apart. Their speculations on ethics and 
politics were blent with guesses at the phenomena of external 
nature, religion was blent with mythology, poetry with history, 
gods with men. It is good for us, in the midst of our complex and 
artificial civilisation, good for us in whom the sense of beauty is less 
spontaneous, whose creative power is clogged by a weariness of the 
past, and who are haunted by doubts of all that cannot be estab- 
lished by the methods of science, to turn back to these simpler days, 
and see things again in their simplicity, as the men of Athens saw 
them in the clear light of a Mediterranean dawn. The dawn is the 
loveliest moment of the day, and there are truths best seen in the 
innocent freshness of morning. 

The poets of the early world did not need to strain after effect. 
They spoke with that directness which makes words go, like arrows, 
straight to their mark. Strength came to them without effort. As 
no prose narratives have ever surpassed the description in the 
seventh book of Thucydides of the Athenian army's retreat from 
Syracuse, so no narratives, in prose or poetry, except perhaps some 
few in the earlier books of the Old Testament and in the Icelandic 
sagas, have ever equalled the telling of the tales contained in the 
Odyssey, such as that in which Eumaeus recounts to Odysseus how 
he was brought in childhood from his native home to Ithaca. 
Even among the later classic poets this gift of directness remains. 
It is one of the glories of Lucretius. What can be more impressive 
in simple force than the lament of Moschus over Bion, or the lines of 
Catullus that begin with "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus"? 

However, I return to that which the study of the ancient world 



19 

can do for our comprehension of the progress and life of mankind 
as a whole. It is the constant aim, not only of the historian, but 
of whosoever desires to have a just view of that progress, distin- 
guishing the essential and permanent from the accidental and 
transitory, and noting the great undercurrents of which events 
are only the results and symptoms — it is and must be his aim to 
place before his eyes pictures of what man was at various points 
in his onward march, seeing not only how institutions and beliefs 
grow and decay, but also how tastes and gifts, aptitudes and 
virtues, rise and decline and rise again in new shapes, just as the 
aspects of a landscape change when clouds flit over it, or when 
shafts of light strike it from east or south or west. For this purpose 
it is of the utmost value to know human societies in the forms they 
took when civilised society first came into being. How fruitful 
for such a study are the successive epochs of the Greco-Roman 
world! Take, for example, the latest age of the Roman Republic 
as we see it depicted by Sallust and Catullus, Appian and Plutarch, 
and best of all in Cicero's speeches and letters. The Republic was 
tottering to its fall: dangers were gathering from within and without. 
Caesar's conquests were bringing Gaul under Roman dominion 
and Britain into the knowledge of civilised men. Lucretius was 
presenting the doctrines of Epicurus as a remedy against supersti- 
tion: Cicero and his friends were trying, like Boethius five centuries 
later, to find consolations in philosophy. But no one could divine 
the future, no one foresaw the Empire or the advent of a new religion. 
Or take the epoch of Periclean Athens. The memory of Salamis, 
where Aeschylus and his brother had fought, was still fresh. 
Thucydides, not yet a historian, was sailing to and fro to his gold- 
mines in Thrace opposite Thasos. Herodotus was reciting the tale 
of his travels in the cities. Socrates was beginning his quest for 
wisdom by interrogating men in the market-place. Athenian fleets 
held the sea, but the Peloponnesians were already devastating 
Attica. Phidias and his pupils were finishing the frieze of the 
Parthenon, Cleon was rising into note by the vehemence of his 
harangues. The same crowd that applauded Cleon in the Pnyx 
listened with enjoyment to the Philoctetes of Sophocles, a drama 
in which there is no action save the taking away and giving back of 
a bow, all the rest being the play of emotions in three men's breasts, 
set forth in exquisite verse. 



20 

Or go back to the stirring times of Alcaeus and Sappho, when. 
Aeolian and Ionian cities along the coasts of the Aegean were- full 
of song and lyre, and their citizens went hither and thither in ships 
fighting, and trading, and worshipping at the famous shrines where j 
Hellenic and Asiatic religions had begun to intermingle, before the 
barbaric hosts of Persia had descended upon those pleasant coun- 
tries. 

Or ascend the stream of time still further to find, some centuries 
earlier, the most perfect picture of the whole of human life that 
was ever given in two poems, each of them short enough to be read \ 
through in a summer day. Think in particular of one passage of i 
130 lines, the description of the Shield of Achilles in the eighteenth 
book of the Iliad, where many scenes of peace and war, of labour;; 
and rejoicing, are presented with incomparable vigour and fidelity. 
Each vignette has been completed with few strokes of the brush, 
but every stroke is instinct with life and dazzling with colour. We 
see one city at peace, with a wedding procession in the street and a 
lawsuit in the market-place, and another city besieged, with aj 
battle raging on the banks of the river. We see a ploughing, and a 
harvest, and a vintage, and a herd attacked by lions, and a fair 
pasture with fleecy sheep, and, last of all, a mazy dance of youths 
and maidens, "such as once in Crete Daedalus devised for the fair- 
tressed Ariadne." Above these the divine craftsman had set the ; 
unwearied sun and the full-orbed moon and the other marvels [ 
wherewith heaven is crowned, and round the rim of the shield rolls ! 
the mighty strength of the stream of Ocean. 

To carry in our minds such pictures of a long-past world and 
turn back to them from the anxieties of our own time gives aj 
refreshment of spirit as well as a wider view of what man has been, 
and is, and may be hereafter. To have immortal verse rise every 
day into memory, to recall the sombre grandeur of Aeschylus and! 
the pathetic grandeur of Virgil, to gaze at the soaring flight and) 
many-coloured radiance of Pindar, to be soothed by the sweetly 
flowing rhythms of Theocritus, what an unfailing delight there is in 
this! Must not we who have known it wish to hand it on and pre- 
serve it for those who will come after us? 



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